


We'll Be Safe from Satan

by Oak (oakmade)



Category: The Wire
Genre: Character(s) of Color, Character(s) of Color Only, Flashbacks, Gen, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Potentially Offensive Language, Pre-Series, Psychological Trauma, Racial Epithets, Rape/Non-con References, Relationship Up To Reader Interpretation, Season 4 Spoilers, post-ep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-24
Updated: 2013-01-24
Packaged: 2017-11-26 17:06:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/652507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oakmade/pseuds/Oak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Triage for a wounded soldier.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We'll Be Safe from Satan

**Author's Note:**

> Post-episode "Misgivings". This could be slash or gen; it's really up to you.

He's walking.  
  
Somewhere behind him, Snoop is saying, "Yo. Chris. _Yo!"_ He can hear her put the equipment down. She's coming after him. It's dark and he's walking.  
  
"Chris!" He can hear her steps, the sound of her feet. There's pain: some part of him hurts. Which part? "Ride's the other way, man!"  
  
"You take the car," he says.  
  
"How you gonna get home?" She's in front of him now, standing in his way. How can she be so much bigger than her body? He stops.  
  
"Can't get in that car," he says. Trace evidence. "Gotta walk. Get the car out of here, Snoop."  
  
"Where you gonna go?"  
  
She's almost toe to toe with him. He looks down at her shoes; they're clean. There's concern on her face, but it doesn't matter. She's too far away.  
  
"Take the motherfuckin' car."  
  
She folds her arms, stands tall. "Man, you fucked _up_ right now. Ain't gonna get in no goddamn vehicle till you say where the fuck you goin' and what the fuck you gonna do."  
  
Blood is drying on his face and hands, prickling on his skin. She weighs maybe a hundred pounds. On any other night he could pick her up and move her out of his way. Not now. Her eyes are like flat stones.  
  
"I'm goin' to see Marlo," he says.  
  
Her chin lifts and then falls. "A'ight," she says, quietly, and steps away. He starts to walk again. After a minute, he hears the Navigator start.  
  
He takes off his jacket and wipes his face, then the soles of his shoes. Two blocks east, he vomits on the sidewalk.  
  
One mile east, he hammers on a door.  


\-----

  
Twenty-two, the night after his birthday, he is on the roof of a row house, leaning against the half-collapsed shell of the chimney, and Marlo is lying on his back and saying, "Didn't you jail with the boy Popcorn, from Little Pete's crew?"  
  
"Could have," he says. The moon is out, nearly full and white as a new gravestone. They have this in common: they both like the sky, the breeze, open spaces, escape routes. Not walls. Not locked doors. "House was crowded."  
  
"Skinny boy, gap teeth in front?" Marlo says. "Back on the corner now. Running delivery. Like to know how Pete get that package." He's looking at Chris, hopeful, and Chris shakes his head.  
  
"I ain't made friends up in there," he says.  
  
"Just--"  
  
 _"No,"_ Chris says, and it comes out loud and angry, a surprise to both of them. Marlo sits up slowly, watching him. Chris looks away, and then looks back.  
  
"You did a nickel plus one?" Marlo asks, and he knows Marlo knows, so he doesn't answer. Marlo's eyebrows knit for a moment. "Been out two years--" Again, he doesn't answer. "Fourteen when you went in," Marlo says. Chris nods, this time.  
  
"To Jessup," Marlo says.  
  
Chris says, "Yes," but the sound stops, dies in his mouth.  


\-----

  
For just a moment, Marlo's face opens, shock widening his eyes: "Your blood?"  
  
"No," Chris says, and Marlo is Marlo again. Still water. He moves out of the doorway, and Chris steps inside.  
  
There are two packed Adidas bags on the living room floor. Marlo never rests his head in the same place long. He comes out of the kitchen with a Hefty bag in his right hand.  
  
"Somebody step to you?" he says.  
  
"No," Chris says, kneeling to take off his shoes. "Michael's problem."  
  
Marlo hands him the bag, stands there. Looks. Quiet like an empty church.  
  
He pulls his jacket off, again, and his shirt and pants, and puts them in the bag with his shoes, words assembling themselves in his head, his mouth set tight. Words stack up and collapse, dozens of words, all of them wrong.  
  
He looks up at Marlo from the floor and says, "Man ain't in no vacant."  
  
Marlo says nothing.  
  
"He dead in the street," Chris says, and then, "It ain't Snoop's fault. It's on me. I--"  
  
Marlo turns, suddenly, and disappears into the darkened kitchen. He can hear sounds, but that's all they are. There's no meaning to them. They aren't forgiveness.  
  
He feels the pain now, everywhere, and his whole body is tired. All his strength is on the ground in that alley: all the strength he ever had. He closes his eyes.  
  
A lawyer working for Clinton Reid is convincing him to eat the charge for half a kilo and an unregistered firearm so that Clinton's brother Gator may remain free. He is told he'll do hardly any time at all because there are no felonies on his sheet. He is told they will take care of him. The lawyer does not tell him what "tried as an adult" is going to mean. He is fourteen years old.  
  
"You fucked up your hand."  
  
And now he is a man, twenty-one, lost and full of rage in a city he can no longer trust, and another teenager all eyes and bones is standing over the body of Gator Reid, and looking at him, and smiling.  


\-----

  
Marlo pulls his jacket over his shoulders. Then, almost absently--and that's a shock, because Marlo never moves without a purpose--he rubs the scar on his cheek with the pad of his thumb.  
  
In one swift, easy motion, he stands up. There's something calming to Chris about watching Marlo, the controlled gestures, the return always to stillness; something that catches him, brings him home.  
  
He watches Marlo cross the roof and stand at the edge, looking east across the intersection, toward the city skyline. From down the block comes the sound of the last slinger trying to sell off: "Atom Bomb! Got that Atom Bomb!"  
  
"Pete," Marlo says, contemplative. "Nigga damn near forty years old. Muscle old too. You seen those motherfuckers?"  
  
He turns, and the moonlight is silver on his face. "Chris?"  
  
Chris swallows, searching for their names. "Uh. Ray-Ray and--Julio?"  
  
"Yeah," Marlo says. "Them. Ray-Ray got to be thirty-five at least. Pete need to put the eye back on his boy. Saw Ray-Ray yesterday on Mount, leanin' like a tin-roof shack."  
  
Chris's eyebrows lift; he remembers Ray-Ray from before Jessup, stalking the McCulloh Homes, four-four on his hip, stickup boys pissing at the glimpse of his shadow. "You think--"  
  
"If I'm wrong," Marlo says, "then I ain't never seen a fiend."  
  
He walks over to where Marlo is and stands with him, watching the corner operation wind itself down. The red-gold glow of the downtown lights is in Marlo's eyes.  


\-----

  
"Here," Marlo says.  
  
Chris looks down at his right hand, scraped and bleeding across the knuckles. Marlo is sitting in front of him on the carpet, holding a wet towel. He reaches for Chris's hand, moving the same smooth, careful way he moves to splint a pigeon's wing, and blots the blood, and Chris tries to remember how to unclench a fist.  
  
Marlo makes a soft whispering sound behind his teeth. He lifts the towel to inspect the damage. "Ain't so bad as it looks," he says. "Be all right in a few days."  
  
"Hurts," Chris says. Something is still boiling, sick and ugly, in his stomach and his throat.  
  
 _"Be all right,"_ Marlo says. His voice is quiet as ever, but there is a command in it, as if he makes the world with his words.  
  
He gets up and comes back with a bottle of water. Chris would rather have a real drink, but water is all Marlo ever has, and he doesn't like that look Marlo gets when he catches Chris with a beer, the way his face turns to stone. He hands Chris the bottle and says, "What happened?"  
  
Chris downs almost all of it before he breaks for air. He shakes his head.  
  
"Fuck it," he says. "The nigga dead. Ain't no more to tell."  
  
"I got to know," Marlo says.  
  
He wants it to just slip away, the way dreams do. An angry voice in him says _go fuck yourself, Marlo, I don't have to say shit to you, I don't have to say shit to nobody, I can carry this on my own._ He looks down at Marlo's thin spidery hands pressing into the carpet, and Marlo says, "Chris," and then his voice changes, gets blurred and soft like he's praying or talking in his sleep, and he says--  


\-----

  
"Mm-hmm," he says. "Time for Little Pete to go."  
  
"Marlo?" Chris says, softly, and watches him draw himself up, seventeen and tall as a man, tall as a pillar of fire.  
  
"He's done," Marlo says. "His day is over. Pete, Julio, Ray-Ray, Clinton Reid and Gator, all of 'em. It ain't their time no more."  
  
He realizes the corner noise has stopped, as if they're all listening.  
  
"These motherfuckers," Marlo says, the tone of his voice still low, conversational. "Just because they been alive a while, they get to thinking you owe them something. Think they can command you. Think they can take what's yours."  
  
The corner has been empty for a few minutes now; Chris can see the slouched shapes of the last old touts disappearing down Lafayette Avenue. He is alone with Marlo and the ruins of West Baltimore, and yet he still feels that hush all around, that living silence, bricks and glass and concrete all holding their breath to hear Marlo speak. And Marlo looks out at the city with his eyes all lit up and says, "It's the other way around."  
  
His voice isn't so quiet anymore. He says, "It's what they owe us. That's real. They brought us in the game and they ain't done for us like they promised. Reids should have took care of you and they ain't."  
  
Louder now and faster: "You stood tall for them. Any motherfucker even look wrong at you should've been put down. They take and they lie and they forget your fuckin' name." Rising, cracking across the street like gunfire: _"They bring you in this world you ain't never asked for and they take everything you got and they forget you were ever born."_  


\-----

  
He says, "Look at me. Look me in the eye."  


\-----

  
He says, "It's the other way." He says, "My way."  


\---------------

  
You have to know your people. Maybe one day the boy who makes the drop looks slightly different, and you don't notice--or you do notice, but you don't worry because the count's right and that's all that matters.  
  
You have to see everything. Maybe one day there's a young tout on the corner where the old tout used to hang, and maybe his eyes are a little too bright and maybe he looks at your car a little too long, but you don't think twice about it because you have bigger things on your mind than the lives and deaths of dope fiends.  
  
You have to know the ground where you stand. Maybe you're rolling down Fayette, and your driver came up in Cherry Hill so he doesn't realize there's a hidden alley east of Mount until a Jeep surges out of it and broadsides your Lincoln.  
  
Clinton Reid makes all of these mistakes.  
  
Chris sprays the car with his AK and then covers Marlo as he approaches. The driver falls out when he opens the door, and the night air is so cold that steam rises from his blood as it spreads on the pavement. There is no sound, and no sign of Reid.  
  
Marlo steps away from the car, and Chris stands beside him, waiting, holding the AK and holding his breath.  
  
"Come and get me, bitch," Marlo says, not even raising his voice, and each word drops into the silence like a body hitting the ground. "Come and get the nigga who killed your brother."  
  
When Chris sees a shape break away from the black bulk of the Lincoln he's ready for it--  
  
But he's not ready for the moment when Marlo's hand suddenly finds his and holds on hard, he would never have predicted it because Marlo doesn't _touch_ people but time stops and his breath stops and Marlo's skin is hot and his grip is almost painful, and just for a second they burn together, brothers against death, blazing across the Baltimore night--  
  
And when Clinton Reid comes out of the darkness, Marlo doesn't miss.

**Author's Note:**

> Written 2010.


End file.
